What happens to the author when you trademark yourself?

Lury, Celia, “ ‘Contemplating a Self Portrait as a Pharmacist’: A Trade Mark Style of Doing Art and Science”, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.22, No. 1, London: Sage, 2005, pp 93 -110.

As a professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Celia Lury research interests are in the sociology of culture. She has researched the brand as new culture media and the changing authorship of the modern world. Artist Damien Hirst, a graduate of Goldsmith College who emerged in the late 1980’s, states ‘becoming a brand name is an important part of life. It is the world we live in’. (1)

So what happens to the author in all of this? In the contemporary brand the author function is transformed by the emergence of a brand name. A world comes into existence through media or as Hirst puts it, a response ‘to the world we live in’.(2) Or in other words a response to culture, which is everything we know.(3) Global culture is the mediation of things, or a set of relations between things.(4) A brand, according to Lury, works through a range of artworks, and it must have some ‘flow’ to actualize it. The brand name or identity of the artist acts as the ‘interval’ between works to create ‘flow’ of experience of the world as staged by the artist. Globalisation is a way to increase that flow. It showcases works as ‘effects’ or feelings, rather than representations. The brand is a source of domination, or power.(5) The power of the brand is in consumption and its domination is in its speed and intensity of this mediation.(6) So where is Hirst in this brand? Hirst, as author is subsumed in brand loyalty, as the interval between the works, staging his view of the world through his commentary on art and science. He is part of the sequence between his various works and operates as a brand name. He acknowledges a different position in art by adopting a trademark style.

Another way of looking at this is through Walter Benjamin, a German cultural critic who predicted for capitalist society there would be a need to compensate for the lost aura of art and artist with “the phony spell” of commodity and star.(7) This redefinition of aura as “the phony spell” is how artists like Jeff Koons and Hirst have operated their art careers. The use of a brand name as new culture media, to launch an art career through media sensationalism is the contemporary substitute for artistic aura. Hirst as author becomes the name that triggers the desire for consumption and his artwork becomes a fetish. The aura is created through media sensationalism and celebrity around his artistic provocation. Media complicates the author.

In the case of Hirst the author function has been transformed into a brand name, as part of the ‘flow’ of experience of the brand, subsumed in brand loyalty. Hirst aspires to corporatism as a way to make his brand accessible. The provocation of his work is sensationalist in media culture and this has elevated him to celebrity status. In this he looses his individuality and is thereby culturally constructed by the society we live in. Like Warhol, the next step for Hirst may be to sell his ‘aura’.(8)

(1) Lury, Celia, “ ‘Contemplating a Self Portrait as a Pharmacist’: A Trade Mark Style of Doing Art and Science”, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.22, No. 1, London: Sage, 2005, pp 93.
(2) Lury, Celia, “ ‘Contemplating a Self Portrait as a Pharmacist’: A Trade Mark Style of Doing Art and Science”, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.22, No. 1, London: Sage, 2005, pp 94.
(3) Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real. Routledge: New York. 2005. pp.10.
(4) Lash, Scott. Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things, Cambridge: Polity, 2007. pp.7.
(5) Lash, Scott. Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things, Cambridge: Polity, 2007. pp.7.
(6) Lury, Celia, “ ‘Contemplating a Self Portrait as a Pharmacist’: A Trade Mark Style of Doing Art and Science”, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.22, No. 1, London: Sage, 2005, pp 104
(7) Foster, H., Krauss, R., Bois, Y., Buchlol, B., Art Since 1900 : Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. London: Thames and Hudson. 2004. pp. 600.
(8) Foster, H., Krauss, R., Bois, Y., Buchlol, B., Art Since 1900 : Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. London: Thames and Hudson. 2004. pp. 600.